The Impact of Coordination Quality on Coordination Dynamics and Team Performance: When Humans Team with Autonomy

abstract: This increasing role of highly automated and intelligent systems as team members has started a paradigm shift from human-human teaming to Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT). However, moving from human-human teaming to HAT is challenging. Teamwork requires skills that are often missing in robots and synthetic agents. It is possible that adding a synthetic agent as a team member may lead teams to demonstrate different coordination patterns resulting in differences in team cognition and ultimately team effectiveness. The theory of Interactive Team Cognition (ITC) emphasizes the importance of team interaction behaviors over the collection of individual knowledge. In this dissertation, Nonlinear Dynamical Methods (NDMs) were applied to capture characteristics of overall team coordination and communication behaviors. The findings supported the hypothesis that coordination stability is related to team performance in a nonlinear manner with optimal performance associated with moderate stability coupled with flexibility. Thus, we need to build mechanisms in HATs to demonstrate moderately stable and flexible coordination behavior to achieve team-level goals under routine and novel task conditions.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Engineering 201

Human–agent team dynamics: a review and future research opportunities

Humans teaming with intelligent autonomous agents is becoming indispensable in work environments. However, human–agent teams pose significant challenges, as team dynamics are complex arising from the task and social aspects of human–agent interactions. To improve our understanding of human–agent team dynamics, in this article, we conduct a systematic literature review. Drawing on Mathieu et al.’s (2019) teamwork model developed for all-human teams, we map the landscape of research to human–agent team dynamics, including structural features, compositional features, mediating mechanisms, and the interplay of the above features and mechanisms. We reveal that the development of human–agent team dynamics is still nascent, with a particular focus on information sharing, trust development, agents’ human likeness behaviors, shared cognitions, situation awareness, and function allocation. Gaps remain in many areas of team dynamics, such as team processes, adaptability, shared leadership, and team diversity. We offer various interdisciplinary pathways to advance research on human–agent teams